HM Nautical Almanac Office

NAO Data Services Intranet

HM Nautical Almanac Office provides astronomical data to a wide range
of customers. Information such as times of sunrise and sunset, visibility
of the crescent New Moon and other data is calculated by a suite of Fortran
programs. When David began working at the NAO in 1996, these were run via
an archaic and confusing control program on a VAX machine. David proposed
replacing that with a modern forms-based web interface which would run on
an intranet accessible only within the Royal Greenwich Observatory(RGO).

David was asked to implement the intranet and create the CGI software to
control it. The result was WebSurf. It is used on a daily basis
by members of the NAO and the RGO's Public Information Unit. In 1998, David
added password-controlled external access for external users. Following the
decision to move the RGO's public information service to the National Maritime
Museum (NMM) at Greenwich, this facility has been named as a central part of
the NAO's contribution to the NMM's new role.

Online User Survey of "The Astronomical Almanac"

The Astronomical Almanac is the flagship annual publication of
HM Nautical Almanac Office and is the definitive source of high-precision
data on the Sun, Moon and planets. It is produced jointly by HMNAO and the
Nautical Almanac Office of the United States Naval Observatory (USNO).

At a meeting in November 1997 between the two almanac offices, it was agreed
to revise The Astronomical Almanac completely, but only after
asking the users of the book for their views. David was assigned the task of
implementing a web-based user survey.

The structure of the survey parallels the structure of the Almanac itself: it
is split into sections corresponding to the sections of the Almanac, and the
CGI software (written in Perl) allows the respondent to move freely back and
forth between sections. The software remembers and re-displays respondent's
previous answers.

We are no longer involved with this site.

QMUL Astronomy Unit

The Astronomy Unit at Queen Mary, University of London, is one of the leading
astronomy research centres in the UK. Lynne was taken on as Webmaster at
very short notice (two days!) in 1996 when the previous Webmaster moved on
to a new position. Since then, she completely redesigned the site. She
was responsible for the maintenance of the Unit's web site and the contents of
all of its pages. This meant regular updates of personnel rosters and
seminar schedules as well as the index to hundreds of astronomy-related
external links. Lynne also advised members of the Unit on any web-related
issues.

David's CGI skills were put to good use at the Unit's web site. As
a special favour to Lynne, he wrote a suite of programs that allow members
of the Unit to search the online preprints database as well as submit new
papers.

In 2004 she was asked to bring order out of chaos for the web site of the
School of Mathematical Sciences. A complete redesign in 2005 disappeared
overnight with a hard drive failure and Lynne recreated the site from
scratch within a week.

We are no longer involved with this site.

Solar System Dynamics

Lynne helped to design and implement this site, which complements a major new
textbook entitled Solar System Dynamics by Professor Carl Murray
(QMUL) and Professor Stan Dermott (University of Florida).

The web site provides access to a large collection of resources for readers of
the book, including animations and Mathematica® notebooks which
illustrate many of the key concepts. Resources are organised by chapter, making
it easy for the reader to relate them to the material in the book itself.

We are no longer involved with this site.

EuroPACE 2000

Lynne's position as Astronomy Unit Webmaster was directly responsible for her
employment by EuroPACE as the designer of the Topics of Modern
Cosmology web site. Although the web site is located in Belgium,
the design was undertaken in London. All consultations with the EuroPACE 2000
managers necessarily took place via email. The end result was highly
praised by the participants in the course.